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B(oston)BWAA Makes Trevor Wait

Trevor Hoffman is a future Hall of Fame closer. At least that’s what everyone is saying after he finished just five votes short of joining Pudge, Jeff Bagwell, and Tim Raines in the 2017 Hall of Fame class.

To his credit, Trevor Hoffman has taken the razor thin disappointment about as well as you could expect. Not that you’d expect anything but pure class from the guy, but there are other Hall candidates voicing their complaints by making jokes at fake Sidney Ponson… so it’s worth pointing out Hoffman’s attitude. Wednesday on the Darren Smith Show, he even hinted at a possible 20 year reunion, in Cooperstown, for the 1998 Padres. That would be sweet.

What’s not sweet is how Hoffman came up just five votes short of induction. A lot of people have been quick to point out the eight ballots that included Hoffman in 2016, but not 2017. I’m actually not that annoyed by those votes, since ballot gridlock, a five-percent threshold for future consideration, and a newly-introduced ten year ballot limit simultaneously a) may have pushed Hoffman down to 11th, b) may have caused voters to throw a few rogue votes hoping to prop up “in the conversation, sorta” players for future consideration, and c) made Tim Raines an absolute must for the ballot this year.

I get that, if that’s what happened.

But that’s not what actually happened. Sure, some public ballot revealers openly stated Hoffman was 11th on their list, but that isn’t the main culprit.

The main culprit – stop me if you’ve heard this hot take – is East Coast bias. No, seriously! And no, I’m not even talking about Everything Supports Patriots Nation’s absurd “notable players” list on Outside the Lines that omitted Trevor Hoffman:

According to Ryan Thibodaux’s tracker, 243 ballots (out of 442) were made available publicly. Of those 243 known ballots, 66 of them omitted Trevor Hoffman, giving Hoffman 72.7% of the known vote going into the announcement on Wednesday. Needing 75% and ending with 74%, Hoffman clearly was bogged down by the voters who revealed their ballots early.

Here’s a complete list of the voters who voted against Trevor Hoffman and their location. Note that the location might be slightly off for some, but this was based on what I could find publicly through wikipedia, Twitter, and recently published work:

BBWAA Member

Location

Jeff Fletcher

Anaheim

Mark Bradley

Atlanta

Peter Abraham

Boston

Bill Ballou

Boston

David Borges

Boston

Paul Doyle

Boston

Alan Greenwood

Boston

Scott Lauber

Boston

Art Martone

Boston

Tony Massarotti

Boston

Joe McDonald

Boston

Brendan Roberts

Boston

Bob Ryan

Boston

Dan Shaughnessy

Boston

Michael Silverman

Boston

John Tomase

Boston

Mike Harrington

Buffalo

Ryan Fagan

Charlotte

Bernie Lincicome

Chicago

Carrie Muskat

Chicago

Mike Nadel

Chicago

Phil Rogers

Chicago

Gordon Wittenmyer

Chicago

Paul Daugherty

Cincinnati

Scott Priestle

Cincinnati

C. Trent Rosecrans

Cincinnati

Bill Livingston

Cleveland

Tim Cowlishaw

Dallas

Lynn Henning

Detroit

Tom Keegan

Kansas City

Sam Mellinger

Kansas City

Jeff Passan

Kansas City

Rick Plumlee

Kansas City

Joe Posnanski

Kansas City

Juan Vené

Miami

Steve Wine

Miami

Peter Botte

New York

Larry Brooks

New York

Pete Caldera

New York

Murray Chass

New York

Ken Davidoff

New York

Mark Feinsand

New York

Mark Hale

New York

Anthony McCarron

New York

Eric Nunez

New York

Steve Popper

New York

Mike Puma

New York

Mike Shalin

New York

Joel Sherman

New York

Mike Vaccaro

New York

George Willis

New York

Pat Caputo

Oakland

Josh Dubow

Oakland

Alan Robinson

Pittsburgh

Bob Smizik

Pittsburgh

Andrew Baggarly

San Francisco

Mark Purdy

San Francisco

Jim Caple

Seattle

Willie Smith

South Carolina

Mark Saxon

St. Louis

Mike Berardino

St. Paul

Phil Miller

St. Paul

John Romano

Tampa

Jeff Blair

Toronto

Rob Gillies

Toronto

Dave Perkins

Toronto

Peter Barzilai

Washington D.C.

Notice any trends? Amazingly, there were 14 ballots from the Boston area – more on this later – alone that omitted Trevor Hoffman. Another 15 New York ballots omitted Hoffman. Only 6 West Coast ballots omitted Hoffman.

This is not insignificant. In fact, using Fisher’s Exact Test – a statistical method to determine the “rarity” of a contingency table in a random sampling – we see that the revealed Boston vote is very statistically significant, with a two-tailed P value of .0041. If you aren’t familiar with what the P value means:

If there really is no association between the variable defining the rows and the variable defining the columns in the overall population, what is the chance that random sampling would result in an association as strong (or stronger) as observed in this experiment?

In other words, the Boston/Not Boston contingency table is very unlikely if the null hypothesis, that Boston voters are not different from non-Boston voters, is true:

And while New York had 15 no votes, they also had 30 yes votes: a statistically insignificant P value of 0.3682. California, meanwhile, was somewhat biased in Hoffman’s favor, but not enough (P = 0.0966) to definitively conclude anything:

Outside of statistically biased Boston, Hoffman got the required 75.6% of votes needed for induction. In fact, if just 65% of the known Boston ballots voted in Hoffman’s favor, he would have been inducted.

But that’s not even what makes the vote an East Coast sham.

What I really want to talk about is how the fuck Boston, with one baseball team, has roughly 10% of the entire electorate. As you can see, a whopping 26 (10.7%) of all revealed ballots originated from Boston Red Sox territory. There were dudes with votes from obscure newspapers scattered all across New England. Writers from newspapers in Framingham (20 miles away from Boston), Worcester (about 50 miles), and Hartford (keep going)… and then some dude that covers UConn basketball in New Haven, ESPN.com’s Boston Bruins hockey analyst, a couple editors in the Boston area, and like six people each from the Boston Globe and Boston Herald.

That’s 26 from just the known votes for one baseball team spanning a population center of roughly 14 million people. And yet Southern California, home to three baseball teams and a population of over 22 million, has just 9 of the 242 known ballots. Proportionally, the Southern California teams receive just 1/9th the representation as the Boston Red Sox.

If writers in Framingham or Hartford and hockey writers get a vote, where’s San Bernardino’s Dodgers representative? Does Bakersfield have a voter? To make all things even, we’ll need to get a vote for the Santa Barbara News-Press sports editor, at least three votes for Lee Jenkins, and then make it rain with votes for former North County Times scribes and all the Chargers-turned-Padres writers the UT now possesses. Hey, if Crayonepa can do it, Kevin Acee and Michael Gehlkin sure as hell can.

What ticks me off the most, though, isn’t that Hoffman didn’t get inducted, since there’s a really high probability that happens next year. It’s that we all know that as soon David Ortiz hits the ballot, Bawb Wyan and the rest of the Boston mafia will instantly forget the Wins Above Replacement arguments they’ve made against Hoffman. Instead, they’ll say their their spherical, roiding DH deserves to enter the Hall despite trailing many fellow sluggers they left off their ballots in WAR: Gary Sheffield (by 12 wins), Edgar Martinez (by 15), Larry Walker (by 18), and Barry Bonds (by 2.3 David Ortiz careers).

2 responses to “B(oston)BWAA Makes Trevor Wait”

I think the thing you really hit on here is how ridiculous, as a whole, the voter group is. People who haven’t covered baseball in years or *barely* cover baseball somehow get a HoF ballot. I know they’ve taken some steps to clean this up of late, but it’s not good enough. The voter group should really be trimmed further, and more online people should get a vote right away, without having to wait 10 years (not that that would necessarily help Hoffman’s cause). I’d be interested to see the geographical breakdown of the entire voter group.

Also, since I’m here, I disagree about Ortiz, but whatever. He’s a borderline candidate by regular/WAR numbers, but he gets a major boost for postseason performance and the whole “fame” thing.